“Ellie, the last thing I want is for you to be nervous around me.” He rested his hand on the arm of her chair, the closest he would allow himself to get to her. It still seemed impossible that he even had to say those words out loud, but here they were sitting next to each other like something close to strangers. Why was it that the plan they made together was making him feel like they were even further apart?
“I don’t want to be nervous around you, Cris,” she said, letting out a breath. “I want this to be fun.” Her eyes glanced down at his hand, and he hoped that it wouldn’t burst into flames.
“You what?” he asked. Her voice had gotten so low on the last sentence he could barely hear it, but he knew it was something to hang on to. He wanted to make sure she heard it, too.
“I said I want this to be fun.” Still, there was that vein and her tense lips. He wanted to lean in and kiss them open, drop all of this dancing around and get as inappropriate as possible. And there it was again. Kissing Ellie was not the end goal of all of this, clearing his name was. He couldn’t confuse the two. But what if he could have both? He slid his hand off her chair and leaned back. He didn’t have that kind of luck—not in this life or any other. All he could hope for was not having to choose one over the other.
“Great.” He grinned. “We start tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 12
“This print—I can’t decide if it’s chic or if I would look like Easter Sunday threw up on me.” Greta held a dress up to her shoulders and smoothed it across her belly with her other hand.
“I think lavender flowers on a yellow background definitely give bunny vibes.” Ellie wandered over to a navy-blue option with a twee white collar, complete with embroidered red stars along the edges. “Prefer to go sailing?” she giggled, holding the dress up. Greta frowned. They’d been looking for dresses that didn’t make Greta look like a piece of furniture, a member of an over-sixty-five community in Florida, a naval officer, or the fuzzy, floppy-eared bearer of chocolate eggs.
“I’m giving up. Graziella won’t mind if I show up to the wedding in my bathrobe, right? I can’t understand who designs this crap. I’m pregnant and everyone wants me to dress like I’ve never even seen a penis.”
“Our culture doesn’t like to see sexy and pregnant in the same human. I disagree, of course.”
“That’s like saying they don’t like to see an oven next to a pizza. How do they think this gets here?” She waved a hand over the bump.
“Maybe we should try a dress shop that doesn’t carry maternity clothes? Something with an empire waist or no waist at all? What happened to the one you were going to wear to my wedding?” Ellie asked.
“I burned it along with your save-the-date card. No, I’m kidding, but that dress is totally wrong for a beach wedding. Plus, ugh—the karma.”
“That’s ridiculous. Not that it’s too fancy for the beach—the karma thing. It’s really a nonissue,” Ellie said, diving into another rack of disasters.
“How can you say that when thatstronzoblew up your life?”
“Because I think about how much better everything has been since he did.” She smiled. Most people would probably find it difficult to recover from a breakup that included a canceled wedding. The main thing that bothered Ellie about breaking up with her fiancé was that it was timed close enough to her autism diagnosis that people might think she was so distraught about her relationship ending that it sent her on a process of self-discovery. She was fine with emailing an apology to the sixty-four guests and returning their contributions to the honeymoon fund. She was cool with separating the books in their home library and letting Kevin stake a claim on the Eames chair. And it didn’t bother her at all to admit that he’d fallen in love with someone else. However, she couldn’t stand to think that people would assume that her diagnosis came after wailing on a chaise lounge in some psychiatrist’s office demanding answers as to why she had lost love yet again.
The truth was that she’d already had three whole diagnostic sessions before Kevin Peters, thestronzoin question, was dismissed from her life. All credit went to a segment on a women’s chat show fromAustralia she’d accidentally watched, prompting her to make an appointment at a renowned autism center on the Upper West Side. Kevin didn’t deserve the distinction of being the catalyst. If anything, she owed everything to YouTube.
She had loved Kevin at one point, though it was hard to believe in retrospect. Kevin was a smart, sexy, funny architect with a sourdough starter and access to his parents’ house in the Hamptons. He already achieved the highest Ben compliment possible (I thought he was gay) when Ellie learned that not only did Kevin have custom-built closets in his prewar apartment, but he was looking for the right woman to share them with.
He’d asked Ellie to marry him in the secret garden at St. Luke’s Church in the West Village followed by dinner at Via Carota, as a nod to her Italian heritage. That night they ate grilled octopus andcacio e pepeand agreed on a backyard wedding in the Hamptons in September. Kevin begged his parents to start planting rosebushes and Ellie wondered if they could get Janet O’Brien Caterers with only six months’ notice. She would wear a tea-length Jenny Packham and a gardenia in her hair. He was going to wear a navy suit and no socks. It was going to be a perfect, polished affair with an allergy-friendly menu and music at appropriate decibel levels.
Except, it wasn’t. It was normal for Kevin to have to spend time away from the city when he was working on a project. He was known to excel with difficult clients and he would sometimes be gone for days at a time as he delicately handled rich-people crises. However, it was weird that he insisted on washing his own laundry when he came home, even when it was her turn. Then she found him pacing back and forth at the end of their block on the phone when he was supposed to be out running. Finally, when he said he was not interested in theirSunday afternoon ritual of a shower and sex followed by trading sections ofThe New York Timesin bed, she knew she had to do some detective work.
Though Kevin put on a good show of mortification and shame, he was undeniably in love with the recently divorced owner of a four-bedroom post-and-beam in Kent Hollow. It had all started with a mutual love of reclaimed barn doors and cold glasses of Viognier, then apparently progressed to split-crotch underwear and a purple silicone sex toy called the We-Vibe. At least, those were the two items that Ellie found in the breast pocket of one of the blazers in the back recesses of the closet where previously-worn items were waiting to ascend to the pearly gates of Poshmark. It took her almost a full minute to realize that what she was holding was not just a really large and oddly smooth earpiece for an iPhone. The underwear was only moderately less confusing—until she figured out where the strand of beads went.
“But he cheated. Onyou! And wasn’t very subtle about it, might I add.”
“People get caught cheating because they want to,” said Ellie. “I think Kevin needed something different.”
“Yeah. Like a clean right hook to the jaw.”
“Well, let’s be glad you weren’t in the city when you found out or else I’d probably have to come get your pregnant ass out of jail. I wonder—would your bail have doubled with two of you in there? It doesn’t matter. I’ve moved on.” Ellie held the door open for Greta as they stepped out into the humid afternoon air. “Let’s go to that shop on Via Rivarola, yeah?” They turned right to walk down a narrow alleyway between the two main streets.
“The one with the dresses that look like they should come with a wicker basket of cheese and a bonnet? Why not? I’ve already triedevery other kind of ridiculous today. And hey, for the record, I’m proud of you. I’m glad you figured yourself out and that you didn’t need him to do it.”
“Thank you.” Ellie beamed. “Nope! Turns out, I just needed to research sunscreen.”
Despite her work in psychology, Ellie had never even considered that she might be autistic. However, she had considered that she might be in need of a better quality skincare, hence the YouTube rabbit hole leading to the talk show segment on mineral versus chemical sunscreens. That segment led into another as Ellie got up to make tea, and that’s when she heard Lorraine, a forty-five-year-old mother of three, who’d recently been diagnosed with the kind of autism that used to be called Asperger’s, tell her story. Ellie froze where she stood, teacup in hand, in the kitchen. She listened to Lorraine talk about feeling different from the other girls her age, about being confused and anxious in social situations, about having an extremely regimented schedule and eating the same things every day. She even talked about feeling uncomfortable in her clothing and not wanting to be hugged. Tears sprang to Ellie’s eyes immediately, an involuntary reaction to the words spoken. Somewhere inside of her, she already knew.
She’d told Greta first, of course. In all the years she lived in New York as an adult, she had never connected with anyone as much as she had with Greta in Italy as a child. No one could replace her. Truth be told, Ellie never considered trying.
“I am happy for you! Do you feel happy?” Greta had beamed at Ellie from her laptop screen, crushing any insecurity she would have felt sharing her diagnosis.
